The Holocaust doesn't vindicate Zionism

Everyone owes everyone an apology

When I was growing up, I imbibed from various sources a narrative of 20th century Jewish history that forms the basis of how most Jews today conceptualize Jewish politics. According to this story, there were two groups struggling for the hearts and minds of Eastern European Jewry. On the one hand were the Zionists, who were trying to warn the Jews of their impending doom, imploring them to take their destiny into their own hands, and go to safety in the Land of Israel. On the other were the Orthodox (what we now call ‘Charedim’), who told Jews to stay put, to continue with their traditional lifestyle, to pray, and that everything would be fine. Then the Holocaust happened, proving that the Zionists were correct and discrediting the Charedi model of Jewish collective action (or inaction) forever. 

More sophisticated versions of this narrative included Bundists who, like the Zionists, rejected orthodox passivism, but thought Jews, instead of leaving, should work with other oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe to build a better future. Obviously, they, too, were proved wrong by the disaster of Soviet Communism that they helped bring about, with Russian Jews fleeing, as soon as they were allowed, to the state of Israel, leaving Zionism the clear winner.

Like all narratives this is overly simplistic and leaves out various details. On top of that, it is also false.

Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask? 

There weren’t three Jewish ideologies competing for attention in the shtetl, there were four. The one that is missing from the typical folk history of Jewish collective consciousness today is Territorialism. 

The Territorialists agreed with Zionism about the need for Jews to take concerted political action to secure a different future. In fact, the Territorialists started off as Zionists. They split from the movement in the wake of the Sixth Zionist Congress of 1906, which rejected the Uganda settlement plan, and the Seventh, which formally ruled out any territory other than Palestine. This forced apart a latent tension in Zionism as expressed by both Pinsker and Herzl: was it primarily a rescue movement providing rational answers to the problems of Jewish existence or was it a variety of romantic nationalism? I’ll now quote liberally from the article “Zionism without Zion”? Territorialist Ideology and the Zionist Movement, 1882–1956 by Gur Alroey and add a few comments:

The territorialists stressed the factor of time as a vital component in the choice of territory. Their main claim was that Jewish distress was increasing geometrically while Zionist endeavors increased arithmetically, and therefore the Zionists did not have enough time to set up a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. This led to a pessimistic territorialism that viewed Jewish life both in the diaspora and in the Land of Israel as impossible.

So, contrary to the folk mythology, it was not the Zionists who were sounding the alarm bells, but the Territorialists. Indeed, following the split, the fundamental difference between the two movements was that the Zionists didn’t think there was any particular rush:

Yet, if the territorialists and Zionists agreed on the diagnosis, they were certainly divided on the prognosis. The territorialists were pessimistic about the economic and existential future of the Jews in eastern Europe. They feared that the countries absorbing the migrants would close their gates and Jews would find themselves without a suitable alternative. Persecution, suffering, and economic distress would be their lot and they would sink into a prolonged depression without the chance of rescue. It was therefore necessary to find a land of refuge, the earlier the better. The Zionists, on the other hand, after the Seventh Congress, discarded the “catastrophic Zionism” that characterized the period of Pinsker and Herzl. Contrary to the territorialists, who thought that current realities would only worsen the situation of the Jews, Zionists were convinced that expected political changes would benefit East European Jewry.

So, not content with making their own mistakes, Zionists mimicked the mistakes of the Bundist movement by arguing that political changes in Europe would make life easier for the Jews. For Zionists, the problem with life in the diaspora wasn’t that it was unsafe, but that it was inappropriate for some mystical or cultural reason:

In the initial period, that of Pinsker and Herzl, negation of the diaspora entailed a belief that the diaspora’s continued existence in Europe was doubtful given the grave physical dangers that faced the Jews. Yet in the years following the Seventh Congress, the Zionist movement gradually moved beyond issues of physical survival to a cultural critique, negating any legitimacy for Jewish existence outside of the Land of Israel and beyond the sphere of Zionist ideology. In territorialist ideology, however, “negation of the diaspora” did not undergo any change and remained as it had for Pinsker and Herzl—the call for a safe haven.

The Territorialists were also far more clear-eyed about the obstacles to the formation of a Jewish nation home in the Land of Israel, unlike the Zionists who were engaged in major cope:

The Arab population of the Land of Israel was another important factor in disagreements between the early territorialists and the Zionists. The territorialists recognized this problem before the Zionists did and showed a sensitivity to the Arab issue, drawing their rivals’ attention to the fact that the Land of Israel at the fin de siècle was home to over half a million Arabs already and that, in the existing demographic reality, an insoluble bloody conflict between the two peoples was bound to occur should Jews settle there in large numbers. The Zionist leadership minimized the importance of the Arab question, which in time would become one of the most central, problematic, and intractable issues facing the Zionist movement.

On the two key issues - the future of Eastern European Jewry, and the obstacles to the settlement of Palestine - the Territorialists were right, and the Zionists were wrong. However, in life you don’t get any prizes for being right:

During years of tranquility and optimism, territorialism lost its hold over Jewish society and territorialist activists began to find other political frameworks. The Balfour Declaration and the first years of the British Mandate in the Land of Israel were years of hope and soon territorialism became marginal at best. Territorialists analyzed reality without illusions. They regarded the persecution of the Jews as an existential danger, and their rescue was the main motivating force in territorialist activities. However, analysis alone of the problem was not sufficient to propel a national movement. The territorialists detached emotion from their national endeavor and assumed that during the years of distress the Jews would go to any territory. But it turned out that dire forebodings were insufficient to inspire hope in their followers and to harness them to a national endeavor. During periods of calm and quiet, the territorialists found it hard to continue their work. With the same speed with which Zionist activists moved from Zionism to territorialism, they abandoned it and returned to the bosom of Zionism.

The Zionist movement appealed to nationalist sentiment that rested on a historical-mythological foundation whereas the territorialist organization was based on a scientific, rational, and intellectual approach that was incapable of generating mass appeal. The tools of research and scientific thought (review, statistics, choice of alternatives, etc.) are not valid in a national discourse that is essentially mythological at heart. Herein lay the secret power of the Zionist movement and a main source of the territorialists’ weakness.

Sad.

Charedim vs. Zionists

Religious Zionists come out of this story looking OK. Kookyan Zionism hadn’t been invented yet and so the Religious Zionists took a pragmatic approach to the Uganda proposal, though they participated in the general reversion to Palestine-only Zionism once the pogroms died down. More controversially, I think the proper context also makes the Charedim look better too, at least relatively speaking.

The Charedi response to horrors like Kishinev was, essentially, to wait till it blew over. Eastern Europe was their home (they had been there for substantially longer than either the first or second temple periods) and Poland-Lithuania and the Austro-Hungarian empire, at least, had generally been good to them. Things were rough (and this was to be blamed, according to traditional Jewish principles, on the lamentable levels of halachic observance that had set in over the past century), but they would get better.

And they were right, things did get better. Eastern European countries today are democracies who respect both individual and religious rights, but have not (yet?) been sucked up into the radicalism of mass immigration and mandatory LGBT celebration that causes grief for Jews in Western Europe. The Jewish community in Hungary is the most safe and secure in Europe, perhaps even the world. It is certainly orders of magnitude safer than Jews are in Israel. Of course, the problem is that, before things got better, they got a whole lot worse, but, in their inability to predict the calamity of the mid-20th century, Charedim made exactly the same mistake as the Zionists. As to where they differed, namely whether a Jew today is safer in Eastern Europe or Israel, clearly, they were correct.

In the 1930s, the reverse was true, and everyone, Charedi and Zionist alike, realized the urgency of the situation, but it was too late. The Zionists had achieved many things over the past 50 years, but their crowning achievement was getting the doors of immigration to Palestine slammed firmly shut. Back to Alroey:

It was only in the 1930s (and in the years following the Holocaust) — when the Zionist movement realized the extreme distress of the Jews in Europe for the first time, making it necessary to find a swift solution in the Land of Israel — that the Zionist movement began to use terms taken from territorialist ideology of the early twentieth century.

Better late than never as the phrase goes, though, in this case, it wasn’t. For next time, let’s all resolve to do better.